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Focus

Focus, or Focus 580, was WILL Radio's flagship talk program from 1981 until 2014. David Inge was the host from 1981 until his retirement in 2012. Always engaging, the program acted as a resource for citizens to directly question politicians and candidates as well as keep up on the arts, science, health, and even the latest from well-known novelists.

The Focus archive below offers thousands of great interviews and serves as a time capsule and a great resource for researchers and those just curious about how influential people spoke of important topics as they were happening.

There’s been a steady flow of industry and people out of some downstate Illinois factory towns for years. This hour on Focus, we'll look at the numbers and hear from one town that has stopped the outflow of people, even after their Maytag plant relocated.

In many places in Illinois, providers are looking to telemedicine to expand access to psychiatric care. Friday on Focus, we take a look at the nuances of treating patients via a computer screen as a part of our series “Unmet Needs: Living with mental illness in central Illinois.”

Friday, April 11 at 11:00 a.m. central time, Lindsey Mooon @lindseysmoon will be hosting a Twitterchat with reporter Sean Powers @SeanCPow at the hashtag #WILLchat to talk about mental illness and the associated stigmas that exist in Illinois.

If you’ve been following the crisis in Ukraine and the fight for Crimea, do you have unanswered questions about why Russia is so invested? We do, and we wanted to get a better understanding of the historical context of the conflict. Kathryn Stoner, a political scientist who is a Senior Fellow at the Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford, has prepared a reading list that she says go a long way in explaining the Russian perspective.

Continue reading to find her reading list and descriptions of the books and their authors.

Director of Outreach for Get Covered Illinois Brian Gorman says young people are signing up for health coverage through the Affordable Care Act's health care marketplace in the final days for enrollment, something that Illinois officials has been concerned about. He talked with Scott Cameron during this Focus interview about how many people have signed up so far. He says its important that the "extension" for enrollment announcedyesterday by the Obama administration doesn't give people more time to start the process of enrolling; it only gives you more time to finish an already exisiting application for insurance.